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Young Cutter, who was really quite unsuitable for such a pastime, gave way completely each time we listened with fascination to the plopping of the bombs’ ascent from the enemy hill and lay quivering during the tantalisingly long wait for the whisper of their descent which sounded for a moment before our surroundings erupted to shattering crashes painful to the ear. As each climax came, the whimpering misery of Pte. Cutter broke out in an uncontrollable stream of verbal pleading. He recovered enough in between to murmur ‘I’m sorry, Sir’ … I felt a wealth of sympathy for Cutter, but dared not show it for I felt he would just collapse the more. He had so lost control of himself by the time a pause arrived long enough for us to scamper out and continue digging that I told him to stop where he was until he had collected his wits. He was in such a state his condition might have put ideas into the heads of others. He grovelled in the sand moaning ‘Oh God! Oh God, when will it stop … Sir … I, sorry. God! Oh stop it.’ No one mocked him or made fun. We had all tasted too vividly of the ordeal ourselves to feel anything but great compassion.

With experience, men overcame their initial delusion that all those who found themselves beneath a storm of high-explosive must be doomed to die: they discovered that most soldiers survive most battles. Thereafter, it became a matter of personal taste whether an individual decided that he himself was bound to be among the fortunate, or condemned to join the dead. ‘We had learned our first lesson, that fate, not the Germans or Italians, was our undiscriminating enemy,’ wrote a Royal Engineer corporal in Sicily. ‘With the same callousness as Army orders; without fairness or judgement. “You and you dead, the rest of you, on the truck.”’ Farley Mowat wrote in August 1943 with the gaucherie of his twenty-two years: ‘It’s hard for guys my age to grasp that nobody lives forever. Dying is just a word until you find out differently. That’s trite but horribly true. The first few times you almost get nicked you take it for granted you are almost immortal. The next few times you begin to wonder. After that you start looking over your shoulder to make sure old Lady Luck is still around.’

Many men fantasised about earning the privilege of a light wound, what the British called ‘a Blighty one’, which would enable them honourably to escape the battlefield. Chance, however, was often ungenerous: a young officer of the Burma Rifles was flown fresh from India to join an embattled Chindit column in 1944. On the very night of his arrival, he had been in action for less than two hours when a bullet lodged in his right thigh, severing his penis and right testicle. Corporal James Jones wrote of Guadalcanal: ‘It’s funny, the things that get to you. One day a man near me was hit in the throat, as he stood up, by a bullet from a burst of MG fire. He cried out, “Oh My God!” in an awful, grimly comic, burbling kind of voice that made me think of the signature of the old Shep Fields’ Rippling Rhythm band. There was awareness in it, and a tone of having expected it, then he fell down, to all intents and purposes dead. I say “to all intents and purposes” because his vital functions may have continued for a while.’

Jones suggested that some men found consolation in resigning themselves to the apparent inevitability of their own deaths: ‘Strangely, for everyone, the acceptance and the giving-up of hope create and reinstil hope in a kind of reverse-process mental photonegative function. Little things become significant. The next meal, the next bottle of booze, the next kiss, the next sunrise, the next full moon. The next bath. Or as the Bible might have said, but didn’t quite, Sufficient unto the day is the existence thereof.’

The grotesque became normal. ‘One learned to accept things one would not have thought possible,’ said Dr Karl-Ludwig Mahlo, a German army medical officer. Hans Moser, sixteen-year-old gunlayer with an 88mm flak battery in Silesia, was surprised to find himself unmoved when an